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Re: [PPLetterpress] Typeface Design in So Cal

... As long as you ignore his anti-chirographic philosophy ;-) Hrant has the idea that the hand has no place in type design. I don t deny him the right to

Message 1 of 2
, Dec 2 7:35 AM

>Hrant Papazian will be teaching a course, Introduction to Typeface
>Design, at Art Center in Pasadena this Spring. Go to
>
>www.artcenter.edu/atnight
>
>for registration information. Good chance to learn FontLab from a pro.

As long as you ignore his "anti-chirographic" philosophy ;-)

Hrant has the idea that the hand has no place in type design.

I don't deny him the right to his idea.
However, I find it absurd, and personally, I think Hrant's font designs show the fatal weakness in his dogma. However, that said, I have absolute respect for his FontLab acumen!

In other news, I find this quite encouraging, from the ATypI Members List:

Victor Gaultney is a graduate of the Type Design courses in Reading, England, where there is no embarrassment about 'chirography'. He is involved in some very interesting multi-lingual work, including a major project with UNESCO, and developing open source "smart font rendering" software for non-roman scripts and writing systems. His Gentium is a lovely, subtle design, most certainly "broad pen influenced (chirographic)", with support for all roman-based scripts, modern and ancient Greek, phonetics, etc.

At 12:08 PM +0000 11/30/05, Victor Gaultney wrote:

>
>ATypI list folks -
>
>Some of you may remember that we've been working on a font license that is
>compatible with free and open source software - the SIL Open Font License
>(OFL). We've now finalised version 1.0 of the license and encourage its use.
>More details at:
>
> http://scripts.sil.org/OFL
>
>We're also excited to announce that we have re-released our Gentium fonts
>under the new license. This font project started out as my MA project at
>Reading from 2000-2002, and this release is very close to what was completed
>then. See:
>
> http://scripts.sil.org/gentium
>
>We have been (slowly) working on further improvements (other weights, larger
>Unicode support, a full Cyrillic, OpenType, AAT, Graphite), but they are not
>yet rolled into this release. Our work on the fonts is picking up again, so
>expect to see some announcements in the months to come.
>
>In the meantime, enjoy the fonts. :-) And if the lack of one letter is
>hindering you, or you hate the 'Q', the OFL now gives you the freedom to
>change the fonts, and even distribute modified versions - with some
>conditions. We've even included our FontLab source files for you to use.
>
>The biggest change in this release is to transform the fonts into a
>collaborative project of the type/computer/linguistic communities. And so,
>we warmly welcome your submissions of work to be included in the main
>Gentium project. We need designers (you!) to contribute to the project. A
>few of the needs:
>
> - Old style figures
> - Small caps (for more than just A-Z)
> - Help with Greek behaviour specifications
> - Coptic
> - Historic/Ancient Cyrillic
> - Mathematical glyphs
> - Other scripts (Armenian, etc.?)
>
>See the Status page on the web site for more details - including what
>submissions we don't need. Because of the OFL, you can be assured that your
>work will always remain available and free to those that need it.
>
>Regards,
>
>Victor Gaultney
>SIL International

I am seriously considering releasing my Alphabets (www.alphabets.com) library under a similar license.